It's quite a concept—rather than "pulling a Radiohead" and releasing digital tracks as fast as you can, announce your album's release date a week before it's available in any format, and refuse to let it get split up by song. Not only does it help plug leaks and keep a general critical consensus from forming pre-release, it creates an event. Well, despite the clever, modern-thinking marketing plan, there's no hiding that these boys are ultimately traditionalists—that they employ savvy measures in hopes that their albums are heard finally as a whole and treated in the bygone tradition of new releases.

At this point, everybody should know who The Raconteurs are: arguably the best working supergroup since the '60s (assuming you ignore the Nugent-fronted Damn Yankees), and comprised of Jack White (of the White Stripes, arguably the best working duo since Soft Cell), Brendan Benson (a wonderful, if somewhat overlooked solo power pop artist), and the rhythm section from The Greenhornes (a serviceable, though not great, garage band from Cincinnati). The band was seemingly designed to free White from the self-imposed strictures of the White Stripes, allowing him to indulge in bizarre time signatures, bass guitars, and the sweeter tones of Benson's songwriting. But endless touring has coalesced The Raconteurs into an actual, real-live rock band, not just a project.

As White has eased the rules of the White Stripes, allowing more instrumentation and structures (like on last year's Icky Thump), The Raconteurs have become less of a grab-bag of ideas. On Consolers of the Lonely, they've focused their Zeppelin-meets-Beatles rock and moved it towards the Southwest. Much of the record seems to take place in a dusty desert ghost town, with heavy shades of Doug Sahm's mariachi-horned Tex-Mex ("The Switch and the Spur") and Bob Dylan's violin-heavy Desire ("Carolina Drama").

But The Raconteurs are at their best when they focus on their strengths, which are, to put it bluntly, rocking (or rockin', if you prefer) and the interplay between White's bluesy howls and Benson's sad-sack McCartney-isms. While these work fine separately (see "Five on the Five" for the former, "Many Shades of Black" for the latter), it's when they're brought together ("Consoler of the Lonely," "Pull This Blanket Off") that the grand idea—and White is a man of ideas, even down to clothing choices—behind The Raconteurs becomes apparent. While there's no single piece of heart-stopping guitar, like Broken Boy Soldiers' "Blue Veins," this reintroduction to The Raconteurs shows a focused, terrifyingly capable band that's one step away from their masterpiece.